Pass the Royal Jelly Please!

Today was a picture perfect day for checking the hives only to find treachery is running amok in the hives. Both hives have built supercedure queen cells. I'm not surprised Hive 2 is not pleased with their royal highness (Pic 1). The hive has been behind since the beginning but recently seemed to catch up. Inspecting the hive today, we quickly found the queen. However, tho' there was capped brood, there didn't seem to be many larvae and I couldn't find any eggs, tho' it is often hard to see them against the white MannLake PF100 frames. Off with her head and let's get a queen who wants to build some brood! Unfortunately, this will mean a lull while the new queen goes on her mating flight and finally gets back to work. Not sure what happened but this queen is on her way out...Ciao, baby!

I am very surprised about Hive 1 developing a new queen. She has been a dependable layer and there are new eggs and larvae. This has always been the strong hive and I'm disappointed to see something is not pleasing the ladies. I almost crushed the cell but thought the bees know better than I and it would be best to let them decide. I hope there is enough time for the new queens to get established and build up some more numbers before it gets cold.

Hive Notes:
Now that the bees are not pleased with her, we FINALLY saw the queen in Hive 1. This is the first time I've seen her since May when I hung the cage and installed the package. There were lots of bees in the new super but hardly and comb was drawn. I inspected the upper deep and there was about a 50/50 mix of brood and honey on 7 frames. Having seen the queen, I decided to move the empty frames to the center, sugared the upper deep and put everything back as it was. I'll continue to feed them to try to stimulate building comb in the super.

Hive 2 was very similar to Hive 1–just a slight amount of comb in the super and about half of the upper deep was filled with honey (Pic 2). The problem was there is a lot of empty cells and not a lot of capped brood. The bottom deep still had 3 frames untouched with hardly any bees on them. The drone cell frame was as clean as when I 1st put it in in May. leaving the drone frame in place, I moved the other empty frames to the center and then reversed the deeps, putting the upper in the bottom position. My hope is the bees will draw out comb on the empty frames and the queen will move up and start laying in the older cells.

Lastly, I've noticed lot of bearding occurring on this hive (bees standing on the outside of the hive near the entrance).

Plan:
Keep feeding and check the hives in the next 5-7 days to see if the supercedure cells are sealed. I'll also do a better job checking for eggs.

Building an Ark...

Okay, enough already! We've had 6 straight days of hard rain, the corn is laying on it's side and I'm on vacation. The only good parts about this are I'm not at work, I've added new shelves, organized and cleaned the barn and shed and fertilized the lawn (organically, of course).

The bees cannot be pleased so this morning I fed them. They immediately started to take the syrup so it was worth getting soaked. I really need to inspect the hives but I didn't think they'd like me removing their roof in a rain storm. They have been congregating on the front of the hives the last 2 evenings during breaks in the storm and I'd like to see how they are doing with the super I added to each hive.

While I was sitting on the front porch this afternoon, we had a 20 minute lull in the rain. I noticed a couple of the ladies hanging out on one of the hostas. Watching them, I realized it wasn't just 2 bees but more like 20 coming to drink and then heading back to the hive while others came in to take their place. None of the other plants had a bee on them–just the hosta. Here are a couple of pics of the bees drinking...

Did I Say No Honey?

After a quick trip to Germany, I'm a week late posting the progress as of last weekend.

In the previous post I wondered about the lack of honey and pollen stores. There was lots of brood but nothing to keep 'em going. They must have heard me! They've gone into serious honey production and both hives have frames of just capped honey as well as frames mixed with brood. We added mediums with excluders to both hives as the top deeps had 7 frames mostly filled out. We have continued to feed and will do so until they are building comb in the new supers. We used a lot less smoke this time and I was stung 3 times on the left hand. Made for an itchy and puffy left hand for about 3 days.

The best part of the inspection was watching 2 bees hatch (pics 2 & 3). While watching the 1st one start to come out another started breaking through the cap. Based on the activity of each hive, LOTS of bees are hatching! I'd estimate 40-45,000 bees are now in residence in each hive. Busy queens!

Hive Notes:

Hive One has a lot of activity happening in the top deep. I put the 2nd deep on when the 1st had 5-6 frames filled out. I was leaving for Hong Kong for 10 days and I thought it would be smart to add it so they had room. As it worked out, it seems all they did was move upstairs. There are 4 empty frames (including the drone frame) in the bottom so I exchanged 2 frames of brood from the top with 2 empties from the bottom. We still have never seen the queen in this hive. She must be small and similarly colored as the workers but she is definitely a prolific layer. It appeared the bees were building a queen cell in this hive. I scraped it off since I moved 2 empty frames up and added the super. If they were building the cell because of space, I've hopefully solved the problem. If I see another this weekend, I'm going to leave it and assume they know something is up with the current queen and let them superceed her. Definitely makes me wonder what's up because she's laying. I sugared the bees for mites and filled the feeder. They've hardly touched it this week.

Hive 2 is definitely taking syrup. Now that the supers are on, Gayla made 1:1 syrup without Honey-Be-Healthy so not to contaminate the honey. Overall, this hive has come on strong and is now almost even with Hive One. The bees do seem more relaxed in this hive. sugared the bees in this hive, as well.

After not opening the hives for 2 weeks, it was very difficult to pull the frames out of the top deeps because the bees built burr comb between the bottom of the frames in the top deep and the top of the frames in the bottom deep. Using my hive tool, I was able to pry the frames loose. I scraped off the burr comb, leaving half of it for them and taking the other half for us to eventually use to make candles.